I have this term in a reading group been reading the influential mystical writer Pseudo-Dionysius. I have been experiencing alternatively bafflement and excitement in reading his stuff: perhaps more bafflement to tell truth. As Bertrand Russell once pointed out, it is hard to tell sometimes between a profound paradox and complete nonsense.
Here is a classic Dionysian passage, from his letter to Gaius:
Darkness disappears in the light, the more so as there is more light. Knowlegde makes unknowing disappear, the more so as there is more knowledge...However, think of this not in terms of deprivation but rather in terms of transcendence and then you will be able to say something truer than all truth, namely, that the unknowing regarding God espcapes anyone possessing physical light and knowledge of beings: His transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge. Someone beholding God and understanding what he saw has not actually seen God himself but rather something of his which has being and which is knowable. For he himslef solidly transcends mind and being. He is completely unknown and non-existent. He exists beyond being and he is known beyond the mind. And this quite positively complete unknowing is knowledge of him who is above everything that is known.
Is it just me, or is there a bit of slippage in the use of the word 'knowing' here? Is this utterly orthodox, or is it heterodox mystical neoplatonism? Is the knowledge of God which is revealed to us (ie John 1:1-14) in fact some kind of unknowing knowledge? What the?
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